Global Fandom Conversations (Round Three, Part One): Hye Jin Lee and Thi Ngoc Bich (Becky) Pham

Hye Jin Lee (South Korea) and Becky Pham (Vietnam): 

The Relevance of Studying Global K-pop Fandom in Different National Contexts

The Japanese girl group NiziU formed by the South Korea-based JYP Entertainment and Sony Music Entertainment Japan

Becky Pham (BP): Hi Dr Lee, I am glad to have been paired with you in this Global Fandom Conversation, as both of our works examine the intensification of K-pop across the globe, and how non-Korean K-pop fans deal with cultural tensions arising from their transcultural fandom (although you’re focusing on the Korean K-pop fans in this conversation, and me focusing on Vietnamese K-pop fans). 

First, let’s talk about how K-pop’s popularity is attracting more attention from the press outside of Korea. I am intrigued by this sentence in your Opening Statement, “Western media did not always get the story of K-pop's global success right”, apart from their more accurate coverage of how tech-savvy and multicultural K-pop fandom has transcended language, culture, and nationality online and offline, toward high-profile events of political activism such as tanking Trump's 2020 rally in Oklahoma and $1 million donation for Black Lives Matter groups in 2020. Could you elaborate on what it is that Western media has not quite captured about K-pop being global or globalized? Why should we care about these under-reported stories as we attempt to de-Westernize fandom studies? 

Hye Jin Lee (HJL): Thank you for starting the conversation, Becky, and I’m also glad to be paired with you for this Global Fandom project. Even though K-pop, as an industry, has existed since the 1990s and K-pop's popularity outside of Korea is not new, the Western media have mostly responded to K-pop's global popularity as an overnight success or a fluke. I've seen many Western media's coverage attributing K-pop's global success to the Korean government's coordinated efforts, which undermines the significant role that global K-pop fans and Korean entertainment companies have played. In addition, the Western media have connected K-pop's global success with what they consider a harsh and inhumane idol training system. So much news coverages that have "the dark side of the K-pop industry" (or something along this line) in the headlines attest to this slanted Western media view about K-pop. The K-pop industry has many issues that need to be addressed and criticized, but this general painting of the K-pop industry as "dark” or “cruel" leads to many different problems. 

First, it perpetuates Western Orientalism, which renders Asian countries, cultures, and people abnormal, foreign/exotic, and deviant. It also stigmatizes K-pop fans as "crazed," "out of control," or "weird" (labels that many female media fans, in general, have to contend with even without taking up the position of being K-pop fans). It also pushes this notion that the K-pop industry is a heartless "factory" or "machine" that "manufactures" stars (again, you will see many news headlines with those keywords associated with K-pop in the Western media). It makes it seem like Western entertainment is NOT a manufactured product and thus more authentic, creative, and artistic. It ignores the fact that all cultural products created in the capitalist system are manufactured commodities generated for profits. Also, the K-pop industry is not the only entertainment industry that is full of problems. How did the entertainment industry in the US enable Harvey Weinstein, Scott Rudin, Kevin Spacey, Bill Cosby, and many more to engage in abusive and criminal behaviors for so long? So this is what I meant by the Western media not always getting K-pop's global success story correctly.

The superstar K-pop boy band BTS, whose fandom ARMY raised over $1 million for the Black Lives Matter movement in just one day in 2020

After the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing BLM movements last year, K-pop received a lot of attention from the Western mainstream media again. If the Western mainstream media coverage of K-pop has relied on harmful tropes about K-pop as dark or manufactured before, this was the first time we saw a lot of positive coverage of K-pop. However, this turnaround was due to K-pop fans' use of fan practices for political activism in relation to Trump’s 2020 Oklahoma rally and donation to BLM as you have pointed out, not necessarily because of K-pop artists' or the industry's doing. 

While it was great to see K-pop fans being positively discussed as a powerful political force, the mainstream media still failed to provide a complete picture of K-pop fans. For instance, most of the coverage made it seem like the K-pop fans' "K-pop fan" status led them to support the BLM movement actively. They failed to see the intersection between the racial identity and the K-pop fan identity of many K-pop fans from communities of color. In other words, it wasn't necessarily the "K-pop fan" status that propelled K-pop fans to mobilize support for BLM but because of the importance of racial justice issues, including racism, to the fans. Also, the mainstream media celebrated K-pop fans' act of taking over racist hashtags (such as #WhiteLivesMatter or #AllLivesMatter) to drown out racist social media posts as positive political actions. But for many Black K-pop, seeing racist hashtags trend or seeing K-pop stars' images for racist hashtags was traumatic and nothing to celebrate. So even when the media covers K-pop or K-pop fans more positively, we see significant gaps in the offered stories.

BP: While I am not surprised at your detailed and interesting mini-analysis above about the Western media’s binary portrayal of Western versus K-pop music stars as being self-made/authentic versus being manufactured by entertainment companies/mass produced, you have helped me reflect upon certain unconscious bias and linguistic choices that have been driven by our daily consumption of Western news. It makes sense to me now why mainstream English news and even K-pop fans’ discussion on YouTube, for example, tend to more often call Western pop singers as “singers” and “stars”, but K-pop singers as “idols”. At least, to my personal relief and exhilaration, either Western or K-pop singers could be lovingly referred to by the fans as “kings” and “queens” that they “stan”. 

Your unpacking of how we need to account for a multifaceted understanding of K-pop fans’ racial identity and commitment to social justice in addition to just their fan identity is a sharp assessment that seems to parallel the spirit set forth by Chin and Morimoto’s call (2013) for prioritizing a common fan identity over a national one. Thus, let’s zero in on our common research thread on how non-Korean K-pop fans deal with cultural tensions arising from their transcultural fandom to dig a little deeper into these issues. 

You wrote in your Opening Statement that there is a need to understand the “messy" and “difficult" aspect of K-pop fandom, especially among non-Korean international fans, who have to deal with tensions arising from their transcultural fandom. You then cited an example of how Black K-pop fans struggle with their K-pop fandom when encountering racism and colorism from K-pop artists and the K-pop fandom community. I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment that this “messy" and “difficult" transculturally contested space needs more examination from researchers, as I have quite come to the same conclusion for my paper on young Vietnamese K-pop fans in Vietnam from 2010 to 2019. 

To repeat what I have written in my Opening Statement, I conducted a case study of mainstream online news representations of young Vietnamese K-pop fans and the fans’ online responses to their older, more conservative public critics (Pham, forthcoming). I showed how as recent as 2011 and even until now, the Vietnamese public has stigmatized K-pop fans (both female and male youth) as stubborn as a Vietnamese water buffalo--a result of which they are colloquially labeled as “water buffalo youth”, as “out of control” (see attached image of a K-pop Vietnamese fanboy that notoriously attracted Vietnamese media’s spotlight in 2012; this is not surprising as fandom studies has long addressed the history of fan pathologization, and similar to what you have also pointed out about how the Western media still portray K-pop fans as “crazed” and “out of control”), and as “mixed-race” (which is interesting because I think the word “race” here has less to do in relation to US-based definitions of “racism”, but more to do with a strong rhetorical choice to convey the older generation’s fear that K-pop as a foreign cultural force is overtaking Vietnam’s old-world communitarian and patriotism ideologies, potentially toward a new form of Asia-based--as opposed to Western-based--cultural imperialism). 

From your example of Black K-pop fans and my example of Vietnamese K-pop fans, and in response to Chin and Morimoto’s (2013) call for a working theory of transcultural fan-centric studies over nation-centered analyses, first, would you assess that both of our examples are still nation-based analyses of cross-border fandoms? Second, would you agree that nation-based analyses of cross-border fandoms--especially from under-researched nations (such as Vietnam) or groups (such as Black K-pop fans)--might still be valuable and/or relevant?   

HJL: Before I answer your questions, I would like to ask you about your research on young Vietnamese K-pop fans in Vietnam. Your observation of stigmatizing young K-pop fans (from the media, the government, the wider public, etc.) for liking K-pop, a foreign cultural product (although from an Asian country rather than from the West), has also been reported in other countries such as China and Indonesia. The pushbacks against K-pop's popularity in these countries have been connected to their nationalistic desires to preserve their cultural identity. In other words, the young K-pop fans' embrace of K-pop (which can clash with local cultural and religious values) was seen as a threat to the cultural identity that these countries want to uphold. Can the public criticism against Vietnamese youth's affection for K-pop be discussed similarly, or is this more of a result of generational conflicts (rather than ideas about nationalism or national identity)? Youth culture (esp. girl culture), in general, tends to be dismissed and denigrated everywhere. How are youth and youth culture understood in Vietnam, and how does K-pop fandom fit into that? Also, what does K-pop offer to young Vietnamese fans that they might not necessarily get from their local culture and what does K-pop mean to them?

To answer your first question, I think it really depends on the focus of the study. Your research seems to explore how young Vietnamese K-pop fans use K-pop to form and express their identity that conflicts with the older generation's idea about what youth should be or how young people should act. Whether there's a nationalistic component to the older generation's expectation of youth is something I would like to learn from you (as stated in my questions above). You're investigating K-pop fandom within the Vietnamese national and cultural context, so yes, I would say your research is doing a nation-based analysis of cross-border fandoms. I'm more careful to use this frame to discuss research on Black K-pop fans because a Black identity is not tied to a specific country or a nation. The Black experience is not monolithic. Black K-pop fans are not a monolith. But when I used Black K-pop fans' struggles with their K-pop fandom as an example to talk about the "messy" aspect of K-pop fandom, I had the Black American K-pop fans mostly in mind. But I can see this being applied to Black K-pop fandoms in other countries as anti-Blackness and racism is not an American issue but a global issue.

To answer your second question, I think it is still valuable and relevant to analyze K-pop fandom from different national contexts. Even though we live in a global society where everything is or seems to be interconnected more than ever, national identity continues to play a significant role in the way people think about themselves (I think this was more so during the pandemic when people's national identity/citizenship played a role in restricting or determining their mobilities). Although cultural commodities can flow more freely across borders (I'm writing this answer as I'm reading news about “Squid Game,” a Korean series on Netflix, becoming the platform's most watched show ever), cultural values and sensibilities that are tied with people's national identity do continue to play a role in shaping how they're received and consumed. If the goal is to foster a transcultural fan community where fans of different countries and cultures can celebrate their fandom based on shared interests and pleasures by transcending their national interests and cultural, historical differences, I think nation-based analyses of cross-border fandoms seem to be much needed to work towards solving conflicts from cultural and national differences together as much as possible.

BP: The questions you have specifically raised for me about understanding Vietnamese K-pop fans in relation to Chinese and Indonesian K-pop fans and in relation to intergenerational differences are all appropriate and nuanced ones: Based on my limited knowledge so far, I think it’s fair to say that Vietnam and China share a similar ambiguous history of K-pop reception, as Vietnamese and Chinese policy makers and older generations perceive K-pop as a potentially foreign threat of cultural imperialism against their nationalistic cultures. I also think it’s fair to say that for Vietnamese K-pop fans, the disparity between the young versus old generations’ thinking and values adoption are both due to the aggressive expansion of K-pop as a foreign threat (that is more fast-changing and unpredictable due to modern technologies) and intergenerational differences (that always happens across generations, but not any less unpredictable also due to modern technologies). Your sharp question on what it is that K-pop offers Vietnamese fans that their local artists and cultures might not will be something I keep at the back of my head as I delve into my research in the near future. 

I have not researched Indonesian K-pop fans (who might be very religiously different from Vietnamese and Chinese fans), so I can’t offer more comments on that at this point. When I was writing up my Vietnamese K-pop fandom, I couldn’t find any existing literature reviews of K-pop fans in Asia for comparative analysis. I understand that this could be challenging because Asia is such a huge continent with diverse cultural, religious, and national values. But this might be something that participants across Asia in this wonderful Global Fandom Conversation could think about to make it happen. I would be happy to kickstart it, but my vision might be more focused on mobile media and/or youth and parenting cultures, which might not align with other participants we are having here. Readers, if you are a researcher of Asian K-pop fandom and interested in this idea, please do not hesitate to reach out to me.

Hye Jin Lee is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Lee has published and delivered invited lectures on K-pop industry's response to Black Lives Matter and is currently working on projects examining the historical evolution of K-pop and the differences in cultural meaning, status, and reception of Korean entertainment when it crosses the national border. 

Thi Ngoc Bich (Becky) Pham is a Doctoral Student at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, USA. She researches how children, youth, and families appropriate communication technologies, and how their media engagement shapes their worldview and lived experience. Her research has been published in the Journal of Children and Media, New Media & Society, Communication Research Reports, and is forthcoming in Transformative Works and Cultures. Her writing on parenting and popular culture has appeared in Psychology Today. She can be reached at thingocb@usc.edu. For more information, visit https://beckypham.com/.